The Golden Age

Silver ball

I am returning to my writings about the island after an interval of two days. Although I do not wish to try your patience, dear reader, I would like to tell you of my experiences since my last dispatch. But perhaps you need to know immediately whether Tana succeeds in stripping the marble panel of its red coat; perhaps you loathe digressions and dislike books that take you in the course of a single paragraph from a Prague apartment to the tropics and a shack made of reeds, or from the calm of the here-and-now to the picturesque court of a despot of ancient times — before, in the very next paragraph, taking you back where you started, as if nothing has happened. If this is true of you, I wish to assure you that I have no intention of bending your will to mine: should you choose to skip the next few pages, I will not hold it against you. Imagine that they are written in the form of a fold-out strip on thin reed-paper which is inserted in a white pocket and which you do not open. You have my word for it that in the chapters to come we shall return to Illim and Tana and Taal. Gato, too, will make an appearance, and as you learn about an expedition to Devel, the fact that you have skipped a few pages will not compromise your understanding of the adventure.

Now that restless readers have moved ahead, back to distant Illim, now that we are rid of the over-eager, I should like to reveal to you — my judicious reader who is in no particular hurry — that the most important aspects of any story reside in its digressions, even when connections between a digression and the main story are impossible to establish. This is one of the things I learned on the island, and I believe it to be true of more than just literature. There is an experiment we can perform to verify this. If you are working towards a particular goal or trying to solve a riddle (big or small), take the first path that leads off the highway you have drawn for yourself; as you continue on this nonsensical, pointless and indefensible diversion, soon you will glimpse the first flashes of the secret that has so far eluded you, the first letters of the inscription that will reveal the target of your ambitions. Only on the marvellous fringes of diversions that lead nowhere — the paths of resignation, curiosity and adventure — will you find chambers of rest, books of secret learning and the woman of your most agonizing nightmare.

So are you sitting comfortably? I shall take my time in describing to you what happened to me in Michle; there is time enough for us to return to the story of the island. And if one chapter should not suffice for my description of the events in Michle, I know you will not be angry with me if I continue it in a second. Who knows, perhaps the Michle insertion will generate a whole host of chapters, even a book within a book. Or perhaps I will tire of the description before I reach the end of the paragraph and take us straight back to Illim. But let us not concern ourselves with that for the time being — there is still some way to go to the end of the paragraph. Let us enjoy the sense of freedom the diversions grant us; let us breathe in their scent, the pure air of the uncontaminated vapours of sense and intent, the atmosphere of the myriad, always-beautiful encounters to come with monsters on the one hand and luminous beings on the other. But perhaps once again you are dubious: didn’t they always tell you that a work of art is a whole? How can a text be a whole when each of its parts grows rampant without consideration for the others? My answer to this is a quotation from a passage of the Book, where the neo-Platonic king Asa answers the complaints of his advisors that he has had the royal palace built to the plans of thirteen architects, each from a different corner of the world, by the “exquisite corpse” method (though each of the architects knew what their colleagues were contributing). “My dear, over-solicitous ministers,” says Asa. “The relations that create the true whole are those which join the ends of the rampant growing parts. The harmony of the subtle tremblings of the last outgrowths of digression suffices to establish a rhythm for the whole. Do you not see that my palace is the best-integrated work of architecture ever known?”

When in the morning of the day before yesterday I was writing about the night-time struggle in the palace on Illim, I forgot all about the pocket of the Book that resembled Uddo’s pouch — which since my return from the island had lain at the bottom of one of the drawers of my desk. I sought it out and studied the sachets of coloured powder it contained. Their scent was so heavy that it soon gave me a headache. I thought about throwing the pocket away, but instead I put it in my bag. I left my apartment around midday; I remembered the pocket as I was crossing the bridge over the Botic in Michle, and I tossed it into the water. There was a sudden fizzing sound followed by the scattering across the surface of concentric circles in silver and violet. The system of circles drifted several dozen metres downstream before converging at a single point, out of which began to rise ribbons of luminous vapour that came together to form a gleaming silver ball about one metre in diameter. Although the ball appeared to be made of a shiny heavy metal, it soon reached the height of a two-storey building; at this point it paused for a few moments before continuing its ascent along the overgrown Pankrác side of the brook and disappearing into the clouds.

I had no idea what to make of this flying metal ball. I was seized by the strange feeling that my stay on the island had taught me nothing. I had assumed that the strangest thing about the island was that it had no secrets at all — that the island’s greatest mystery resided in the absence of any kind of mystery on the island. Now I suspected that for the entire course of my stay the island had been keeping its secrets from me, that the seeming absence of mystery had in fact been an elaborate, deliberate act of concealment. I was not able to place the gleaming ball within the context of anything I had known on the island. As I stood there perplexed on the bridge in Michle, I thought it probable that I had stumbled across an indication of the island’s witchcraft, of whose existence the islanders had kept me in perfect ignorance. I had several times read in magazines about the theory of the Atlantis origin of the island’s culture, and I had always thought it ridiculous. Now I asked myself if these sensationalist articles and books about the legacy of Atlantis might be more truthful accounts than my own more sober one, which was based on unvarnished facts.

Could an island on which everything takes place on the surface, where not even the mirrors and the transparent walls of water suggest any depths, where the most mysterious spaces — the shallow, gloomy caves with their gemstones — lie behind half-open doors, could such a place possibly have invisible depths? On the island I always knew that the discovery of a single hidden space would suggest the existence of a great many others. So had this fantastical possibility now become a reality? The existence of sachets of powder that transform into a mysterious flying ball was such an unexplained hollow. Might not the island be riddled with hollows, like a piece of cheese? Might it be concealing the underground temples of an unknown cult, where the islanders meet at night in secret? Or chambers carved in the rock containing the mummies of kings of old or ancient chronicles in which is recorded the island’s rich history?

I wondered now if the islanders had been playing a game of deception with me throughout my stay, if they had always laughed at me behind my back. And I felt a sharp pain at the thought that Karael, too, had been party to this game, that she had laughed along with the others at my ignorance and naivety, that she had left the bedroom at night to participate in the playing out of the island’s mysteries. Everything I had lived through on the island acquired a new meaning; in everything I found traces of deceit and ridicule. I wondered at my inability to recognize the obvious. And it came to me that everything I had written about the island up to that point was wrong. In my desperation I accessed my computer’s directory and the file that contained my narrative about the island and pressed the Delete key. But as I was reaching for Enter, I told myself I would sleep on it.